Free Affiliate Link Cloaking For WordPress

Are you looking for how to cloak affiliate links on your WordPress site? Not sure what does link cloaking means? Want to know why you should cloak your affiliate links. In this article, I will explain what affiliate link cloaking is, and how you can get free affiliate link cloaking plugins and software for WordPress.

What is Link Cloaking

Affiliate links are lengthy, cospicous, hard to remember, and give the user a sense of being used by you to make money. Some users element your affiliate username or ID because the feel the product might cost better if they buy direct.

Example of an affiliate link:

http://www.affiliatesite.com/products/?product_id=123&affiliate=123

When I cloak that link on this site, it shorten these lengthy ugly link into branded URLs like these:

http://www.yoursite.com/refer/productname

Both links go to the same URL and both will generate an affiliate commission when a sale is made, but the latter link is SO much better in many ways .

Are You Cloaking Your Affiliate Links?

10 Reasons Why You Should Cloak Your Affiliate Links

It can also help you add an additional layer of click tracking to ensure you are getting paid for every sale you refer.

Improve the SEO Of Your Links By Making SEO-Friendly Web Addresses

Ability to Change The Location Of The Redirect At Any Time

You can also protect your affiliate links from getting hijacked by using link cloaking.

To prevent affiliate ID stripping / commission by-passing

To hide your affiliate links from social media sites

To thwart ad blockers

To stop Losing Money And Turn Your WordPress Blog Into The Ultimate Affiliate Marketing System

How to Cloak Affiliate Links in WordPress for Free

Do NOT use bit.ly, tinyurl, Goo.gl or other link shorteners to cloak your affiliate links. First of all, Bit.ly links aren’t private, meaning anyone can check to see how well your money links are performing. Secondly, they often won’t show up on social media feeds (or they stop working entirely), see example in the picture below.

I have come up with some of the best free WordPress affiliate link cloaking plugins for you.

They are all easy to use for adding your affiliate link. So go ahead and choose any one for maximum benefits.

Thirsty affiliate
Thirsty Affiliates is one of the best affiliate link manager and link cloaking plugin for WordPress. It allows you to easily add your affiliate links in WordPress and manage them from one single dashboard.You can easily insert your affiliate links to any WordPress posts or pages from the buttons on the post editor screen.More important feature I like about thirsty affiliate wordpress plugin is that you can track click, geolocation, importing affiliate links from Amazon and automatically replace selected keywords with affiliate links. Aside from that you can choose the base URL, automatically nofollow links, A/B test your offers, geo-target your offers, get stats, and so much more. I use Thirsty Affiliate on this website and on all my websites.

Pretty LinkPretty Link is another WordPress link cloaking plugin. That allows you to easily manage your affiliate links. You can auto add nofollow tag to affiliate links, shorten links using your own domain name, and redirect them properly.Pretty Link also provides analytics with an easier way to purge older hits from your database. This ensures that these hit logs don’t take too much space on your database and backup files. It has the free and professional version. The professional version is a significant upgrade to Pretty Link Lite that adds many tools and redirection types that will allow you to create pretty links automatically, cloak links, auto-tweet links, replace keywords though-out your blog and much more.

Easy Affiliate Links
Easy Affiliate links is a free to use link stealthen plugin for affiliate marketers. It allows you to cloak links, add and manage all your affiliate links from a single dashboard.It has all the features for link masking.

Wp Stealth is another free wonderful cloaking wordpress plugin with features such as cloak Affiliate Links By Re-Directing Them Through Your Site, Set Up An Unlimited Number Of Affiliate Links, and is easy to install and use. Wp Affiliate links plugin “WP to affiliate” turns ordinary links automatically and in real time into affiliate links.Without changing your content. You simply add a normal link in your posts or pages, and behind lay the affiliate partnership with this provider once directly in the plugin. All existing and future links to this destination domain (!) Will be automatically with your affiliate ID on the affiliate Network. It supports most affiliate programs.

Auto Affiliate LinksAuto Affiliate Links plugin takes a different approach for link cloaking. It does not add a URL base like most other plugins in the list. Instead it allows you to use a keyword as the URL slug for the cloaked link. In terms of features it is very limited, but it does the job. It also offers some basic stats for your cloaked link views.

I hope I was able bring to your understanding what affiliate link cloaking is. And how to add free affiliate link cloaking plugins to your website. You may also want to check out how to get blog content ideas.

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This is a very informative article. I really enjoyed reading it. I was using bit.ly but some platform like Reddit does not accept it therefore I was not able to post any comment there. I also learned in your article that bit.ly is not safe at all and that is something I didnt really know. From now I will go ahead and try to use one of the affiliate link cloaking you are suggesting and see how it works.

Hi BrooksQueen, I have read your page about link cloaking, I find them a bit devious and personally don’t use them. I guess if you are trying to hide something it can come in handy. Your website looks good but the font could be a little more spaced its a bit hard to read. The color is good.
Keep up the good work.

I read your affiliate link cloaking with great interest especially the part of not using bitly or tinurl. I have used them in the past and do not believe that there has been any type of issue when using them. I think I need to do some more investigating on my part as far as this goes, but I will definitely have to check out the sources that you have listed here.
Has any one had any major issues using bitly or tinyurl that you are aware of?
Of the thirsty or pretty link which one do your suggest to use or which one do your readers prefer to use?
I think I am having an issue with my computer…I keep getting a 404 when I click on your links to thirsty and pretty.

I will have to bookmark this site and come back and visit again.
Thanks, Angela

Thank you Angela, is good you read my post. With bit.ly and other shortners your users can be getting this link has been disabled page when they click on your link shortened with bit.ly and rest. An example is with google shortner I screenshot on the post. That is my click bank link to a product I shortened with goo.gl. I will check on the prettylink and thirsty link to see is OK from my end, Thank you Angela is from my end but is all fixed now. the link works pretty well.